Adam and Eve in Paradise

Gloriously translated by Margaret Jull Costa, Adam and Eve in Paradise by Eça de Queirósis not the rosy prelapsarian tale of your childhood Bible: yellow-eyed Adam is a slope-browed Neanderthal all alone and panicked, and Paradise is abominable (seethingly alive with vicious insects and roving primordial carnivores). Luckily for Adam, Eve appears: “O wonder, there before Adam, as if it were both him and not him, was another Being very similar to him, only more slender and covered with a more silken down, and who was regarding him with wide, lustrous, liquid eyes… And slowly, gently rubbing its bare knees together, the whole of this silken, tender Being was offering itself up in astonished, lascivious submission. It was Eve… It was you, O Venerable Mother!”      But still we must pity poor Adam and Eve: “Our Parents’ tireless, desperate efforts were devoted entirely to surviving in the midst of a Nature that was ceaselessly, furiously plotting their destruction. And Adam and Eve spent those days—which Semitic texts celebrate as delightful—always trembling, always whimpering, always fleeing!”         Eça de Queirós’s pleasure in the glories of language and his delight in skewering all complacencies are richly palpable, leaving the reader smiling and sighing: Ahhh, those Genesiac days…

"Portugal's greatest novelist. ", "Eça ought to be up there with Dickens, Balzac, and Tolstoy as one of the talismanic names of the nineteenth century.", "A writer of mesmerizing literary power. We should be grateful for such blessings.", "His excellent prose glides through real experience and private dream in a manner that is leading on toward the achievements of Proust."

One of the leading intellectuals of the “Generation of 1870,” José Maria de Eça de Queirós (1845–1900) wrote twenty books, founded literary reviews, and for most of his life also worked as a diplomat, in Havana, London, and Paris. New Directions also publishes his novels The Crime of Father Amaro, The Maias, The Mountain and the City, The Yellow Sofa, and The Illustrious House of Ramires. Margaret Jull Costa, who has translated Javier Marías and José Saramago, lives in England.